But it got me thinking.  In this supposed age of technological innovation, we seem to have lost the ability to capitalise on those sublime leaps forward that Concorde represents still today; the ability to beat nature at its own game and go beyond what’s expected.  The aspiration to think on a grand scale and have grand designs appears to have passed us by if our attitude to transport is anything to go by.

Take the huge trend towards downsizing your car to little more than a glorified rickshaw, and with as much horsepower. Anybody with any nous is already trying to cut their fuel bills by either driving less, slower, or, in a minority of cases, get themselves a disgustingly moral hybrid car they can casually bring up during dinner parties (back en vogue by the way) as owning.  Our reaction to the austere times we are living in is not to find radical transport solutions, but rather to regress, and try to protect what we already have instead of looking to see how it can be improved. Instead of solving rampant food inflation by creating  enormous industrial greenhouses on the outskirts of cities to create local supplies of cheap and plentiful fruit and veg, people are growing carrots in overpriced wicker boxes on their patios.

In Bristol itself,  this hairshirt trend is being taken to the letter, with commuters ditching their cars and taking to their bikes to get around.  In extreme cases (which are becoming more frequent to the point of being unsurprising), people wearing backpacks and too much lycra are running to and from the outskirts to the city centre to save cash, and  the environment.  However, at the same time, it’s highly likely that a large proportion of these urban nutters will have signed up to a jogging or cycling app thanks to the huge advances in mobile network technology over the past decade. Despite the technological gymnastics, blood, sweat and tears, the mobile space is one industry that is forging ahead with the next generation of innovation, while Bristol doesn’t even have the political stomach to create a tramline connecting the two halves of the city.  However, they are not the only ones who are lacking in imagination.

This year’s Mobile World Congress is expected yet again to wow us, as it does every year, showcasing the best, the most innovative and exciting ideas the mobile network industry has to offer.  It’s a just a bit ironic however that, because of the threatened transport strikes, we will have to put one foot in front of the other to get to see them.

But how do you make them pay?

1) Invest in getting the right bums on seats
Whether a third-party event or your own shindig, you’ll need good data to work from. This needn’t only be purchased data from a quality source; most organisations are sitting on extremely valuable customer/prospect information that they’ve never got around to properly segmenting or nurturing.

2) Develop a reputation for compelling content
Very few prospects – no matter how relevant – want to register for a 40 minute thinly veiled sales pitch. Don’t just counter this challenge with an exciting venue, fun post-event activities, luxuriant refreshments or other inducements. On its own, it won’t guarantee attention during your boring bits. Get an exciting, independent speaker, commission some research, prepare some practical and impartial materials that delegates can take away with them to tackle the business challenges they face.

3) Make the right proposition
Don’t start with the optimum agenda for selling your wares; start with the optimum agenda for engaging your audience. Use a targeted invitation process, study the analytics, and feed this into a telephone-based follow-up process to ensure confirmations are double-confirmed. The thread running through all this is a simple and coherent proposition that everyone connected with the event can communicate.

4) Be ready to record
Where else do you get key spokespeople/domain experts, customers, prospects, partners and media together in a great venue with corporate branding dripping from every corner? So take the opportunity to film it, or at the very least take pictures. The guts of a corporate seminar doesn’t make the best TV, so think hard about capturing something people would want to watch. Like this recent Cohesive example:

5) Always think PR
Established industry events routinely attract journalists and analysts looking for insights, contacts or news. But media relations can also be part of your own events. Get closer to a key press contact by asking them to be a speaker or moderator. Invite journalists along to network with your customers and hear fresh technical insights – strictly on the basis it isn’t a sales pitch. Or how about polling your delegates’ (or trade show booth visitors) views on a series of hot industry issues; and then sharing those findings with the press? Events are also valuable for unearthing existing customers’ willingness to do case studies or go public on their deployments.

6) Share it
Events are social affairs, so be social about them. Encourage discussion about the event agenda on social networks; socialise a hashtag to encourage real-time debate (and be sure to listen!); use pictures and videos to update prospects and followers who couldn’t or wouldn’t make it along on the day.

In case you slept through the onslaught of Cohesive’s ’12 Sleeps’, the site is still live here. http://www.cohesive.uk.com/12sleeps

Everyone has their personal favourite. Mine has got to be ‘Ask Len’. What will you ask him?

Enjoy!

Well not quite.

As the following examples bear out from my recent supporting visit to the enormously successful and fantastically produced Metaswitch Forum in Las Vegas, a professional cameraman and an enthusiastic and loudly dressed presenter are essentials for video production. Note the informal style: entirely on purpose we hasten to add…

Building the atmosphere, backstage…

Ringside with one of the dozen press and analysts Cohesive and its US PR partner secured and facilitated for the event…

One-on-one with a key attendee at the event; fellow Cohesive client OneAccess Networks…

Get your complete fill of video from the Metaswitch Forum here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL228A819836109C7A
(also available for birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs etc.)

While many jumped upon her comments as a highly insensitive example of the worst excesses of spin, I’d wager the same wouldn’t be said in the altogether different circumstances of WillsKate Fest 2011. What better place to discretely throw away your most negative media announcements than under the eager hooves of a golden carriage carrying an heir to the throne and his fairytale princess*?

Actually, that’s selling journalists a bit short. If anyone has learnt the most cynical tricks of the PR trade, then it’s the journalists on the other end of them. Keep your eyes peeled guys, and keep digging down through all the bunting. The bins will probably be stinking, but there could be plenty to make very enlightening stories about early next week.

…

*still no word on what Kate’s official Royal title will be, probably Duchess of somewhere or other

Twitter, Facebook and whatever else your social media tipple might be, has finally put paid to all that. To have taken your perfunctory Friday morning sniff into the social media abyss would have served all the warning you could possibly have needed.

A pity then for all those PRs who wandered proudly onto the 1st April stage having spent a week polishing up a subversive, gag-loaded press release in the hope of elevating their client into mainstream super(ficial) stardom, and possibly even getting themselves picked up as a comedy scriptwriter into the bargain. Sadly, this year, a gallery of resounding raspberries were waiting for you. The best that a hapless PR could hope for was entry into a chart of top twenty April 1st wheezes, to be scored and ranked by a knowing audience of cynical gits against “the one from 1967 about the spaghetti harvest”.

In future, unless we are to consign the April Fool to the wastebin of history, April Fools will have to be a lot more inclusive, or a lot more exclusive. You can’t play a trick on the world anymore, though maybe you can get them in on your joke against the one poor unsuspecting soul who doesn’t use social media.

Likley taking its inspiration directly from Dev’s notion of ‘World no email day’ in our last Cohesive blog, next Friday America celebrates a National Day of Unplugging (NDU). This means no email –excellent, no Facebook – fantastic, no texting – terrific! No mobiles – ummm?

I’m all for unplugging, but I’d strike a case that we’ve come way too far to include mobiles in this scenario. For me, the old BT adage ‘It’s good to talk’ has never been more apt in a world of alternative communications that seem to be designed to avoid voice to voice contact all together. Picking up the phone is far too easy to avoid today, and we shouldn’t be including a good old fashioned chinwag in our tech-dependency gripes. While I know the idea behind unplugging is meant to be  spending time together,  playing board games with family and friends, and I’m down with that, but in a weekend where I am supposed to be focused on catching up with friends, I am also going to use the telephone. We don’t do it enough.

My Mother is a perfect case in point. She recently invited me to Sunday lunch. She did so on Saturday night. By text. Safe to say I missed out on a cracking family get together over a tasty joint of roast beef, but probably far worse, I left my Mum feeling forlorn in thinking that I didn’t want to come to her house for lunch, or even be bothered to respond to her invitation.

Not so of course. The fact is that in my communications world, text is just not real-time. I may be out and about; I may not have my phone about my person, or more often than not, be too busy or pre-occupied to look at my mobile screen for 24 hours a day just in case someone texts. If you need an answer to something from me – don’t write me a note that I may, or may not, read – just tell me.  Pick up the phone, and talk to me. It’ll be cheaper, quicker and you’ll be far more likely to get a response.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as bad as the rest; last week I sent an instant message to a colleague to ask a very quick question about a client. After five minutes of no response, I got off my backside, walked the 10 metres to his desk and got the answer I was looking for instantaneously. Enough said.

This weekend, I may just join our American cousins in its NDU. I am ready and willing to unplug, but I’m not ready to de-phone. On the contrary, I shall be making a conscious effort to call. Speak soon!

I cannae take any more email captain!

Let’s all agree to stop sending emails for a 24 hour period sometime soon. Instead we can talk, or learn a song together or something. Or answer some questions on Quora. Or follow back all those Twitter followers. Or nudge someone’s Facebook wall thing. Or whatever.

Hang on a minute – is this a case of “out of the frying pan and into the fire”?

I witter on about this to make the point that communications are more written-down now than they’ve ever been before. That doesn’t make ‘voice’ any less important; in fact it makes it more important.

I can remember, around 6 or 7 years ago, some freelance IT journalists setting up an ‘email pitching’ training course specifically designed to get PR pros sending emails to journalists in the proper way. The underlying principle, according to the freelancers, was that – under no circumstances whatsoever – should you actually impart this information over the telephone instead.

Take nothing away from the fact that ‘good email’ is a skill in itself, the universality of journalistic agoraphobia still has some way to go. Ever heard the one about the journalist who never conducted an interview? No and neither has anyone else.

Filmed in TechieColour on location in London and Chepstow, using Gwyn’s camera and another one Jen borrowed off her brother-in-law, Cohesive brings you a star-studded cast of musical cameos in our 2010 rendition of ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’.  View it here…

Many thanks to all the journalists, analysts and other media reprobates who gave up their time to take part. 

We hope you enjoy, and we please ask that you give generously to our chosen charity this year – the Variety Club Christmas Toy Appeal — www.justgiving.com/cohesive-communications

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays!

I couldn’t help thinking how brave the marketing guy was who signed all that off in the first place.  Whoever he or she was, they had the audacity to ignore the corporate arsonists and agnostics who would have inevitably sought to compromise their vision into diluted slush, and instead advocate a rollercoaster journey for a brand; taking it from being so-so, to making it a markedly more positive choice for consumers everywhere.    

There are hundreds of reasons to have rained on that particular parade, and not to have run those ads.  Oh, but what they would have looked like otherwise.  Something like this:

-          Strapline: Tango, it’s fruitiful!

-          Call to Action:  Try one today!

-          Motif:  A can of Tango

-          Creative concept: Young people enjoying drinking from cans and bottles of Tango.  Jazzy music.  Maybe have them playing on beach, having parties, laughing etc

Sometimes ideas just don’t quite work, but good grief you got to admire the sheer balls that go into them.  Every idea is a risk.  Every risk, a potential reward.

The maxim of one major international advertising agency used to be: ‘try stuff’.   Now there’s a stimulus for creativity if ever there was one.  Does that sound like you, or somebody else?